The memory of the mobile telephone and its SIM card currently store personal data of the user and mobile terminal state information. Personal data of the user stored in the memory of the mobile telephone and the SIM card is understood to be contacts, notes, calendar, images, sounds, videos, short messages (SMSs), multimedia messages (MMSs) and electronic mail (emails). The mobile terminal state information comprises, among others, the incoming and outgoing calls log, the battery level of the mobile telephone, the coverage level of the mobile terminal and the mobile telephone state (normal, high, silent, vibration only). The mobile telephone offers a variety of services, such as making calls, sending SMSs, MMSs and emails, incoming call diversion and photographing and recording videos with the camera of the mobile telephone. All this information and services are accessed from the mobile telephone itself.
In addition, a mobile terminal is always connected to the circuit domain by means of GSM, UMTS networks or the like. This circuit domain allows it to make and receive calls, send and receive SMSs and USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) messages. The data or packet domain, also called the internet, is not always accessible in the mobile terminal. The technology for connecting to the packet domain can be of very different types such as GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, WiFi, WiMAX, among others. The connection to the data or packet domain is carried out by the initiative of the user or mobile terminal due to an external event or when the mobile telephone has WiFi or WiMAX coverage. This implies that direct requests cannot be sent to the mobile terminal from the data or packet domain, but rather it is the mobile terminal which makes the requests to the packet domain. Furthermore, once the mobile terminal is connected to the packet domain, the location of the mobile terminal cannot be known for certain by means of its IP or URL address, due to the fact that there is no standardized or commonly accepted system for identifying and consequently locating a mobile telephone in the packet domain.
In addition, web servers are known, which are programs responsible for accepting HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) requests from clients, normally web browsers, and providing them with the HTTP responses together with the data contents, which are usually web pages. Web servers are normally large computers capable of providing multiple HTTP responses.
Security and authentication SSL (Secure Socket Layer) applications such as those described in RFC 2617, entitled HTTP Authentication: Basic and Digest Access Authentication, are also known.
In recent years, Representational State Transfer or REST has also been developed, which is a software architecture technique for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. The term REST is generally used to describe any simple web interface transmitting specific data on HTTP without an additional messaging layer or session tracking.
The personal data of the user stored in the memory of the mobile telephone and its SIM card and the mobile terminal state information can currently only be accessed, added, deleted and shown directly from the mobile telephone using the screen of the mobile telephone, the keys, the scroll wheel, pencils or pointers or even voice commands. The same occurs with services offered by a mobile telephone, which can only be executed from the mobile telephone itself.
As regards web servers, although several mobile telephones have a web server, it is rather unusual that a web server of a mobile telephone is capable of providing HTTP responses, mainly due to the lack of permanent connection to the data or packet domain and due to the difficulty of identifying and locating the mobile terminal in the packet domain. For example, U.S. patent application US2001/0046851 describes a mobile terminal including a web server through which the mobile terminal connects to a remote management terminal. The purpose of the web server in the mobile terminal is to allow the latter to control a device connected thereto.
Several methods and systems for attempting to remotely manage a mobile telephone have been proposed to date. For example, European patent application EP1542432 describes a system in which a web server housed in a data network receives HTTP requests from a mobile telephone in order to update data relating to the mobile telephone which are stored in the web server of the data network.
However, this process for requesting information from the web server requires the presence and intervention of the user of the mobile telephone and the direct handling thereof.